Increase in visits after update from 2.16 -> 3.4

In preparation for an update to 3.4 from 2.16, we are running two servers simultaneously.

This exercise is to validate that the transition to 3.x will be smooth. We are using this method to send tracking to multiple servers:

https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-javascript-guide#multiple-piwik-trackers

We are seeing that the new server is tracking many more visits, but almost the same number of page views:

Sunday 4/1

Saturday 3/31

Notice our event tracking is nearly identical, which is good.

The server on the right is the clone of production, upgraded to the latest version of Matomo.

Neither server has a config variable defined for “visit_standard_length”. Has the default changed?

This issue is blocking our upgrade, so any insight would be welcome.

The test server is an exact clone of production, except test is an m3.medium and prod is a m3.large. We are also manually triggering archiving in test.

Hi,

For anyone else searching for answers on this issue:

We found this to be a bug in both 2.16.5 and 3.4 though the handling is a bit more graceful in 2.16.5.

The root cause appears to be when the initial set of requests for a visit are simultaneous (as defined by the apache log 1s granularity), the system creates multiple visits with a single event. This can happen in high traffic Websites and also when you’re tracking lots of events.

The solution was to move to the QueuedTracker plugin. We installed redis locally on the server and enabled the QueuedTracker plugin. After that, all the numbers started to align.

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